Wednesday, April 23, 2008 5:48 PM
I remember playing this game on my Sega Genesis...it was one of the Phantasy Star series where eventually your character had to get married. Who you chose as your wife would determine which character you would get in the *next* generation (or phase of the game). I feel like I'm reliving that, only my console has been replaced with the world wide web and my choices aren't nearly as sexy.
For the last 7 years we've been learning the web form framework, learning the ins and outs of state management (regardless of your opinion if its good or bad), how to manage postbacks, and how to make the web bend and do summersaults based on what our needs were. And here we are again, looking at the next big paradigm shift: Webforms are still around, Rails-like frameworks are the new trend, and we have a vector based Flash-like framework that we can code in .NET. I find it funny that so many are wondering whether web forms will go away because of the new MVC framework Microsoft is developing, and *totally* ignore the bigger threat: being able to develop winform-like applications that will run on the web using Silverlight. If I'm a web developer, THAT sounds sexier to me then figuring out which *new* way to generate HTML I'm going to use.
When I got out of college in 2001, I jumped into a web-form gig...and didn't look back. That's been my focus for the last 7 years. I think I'm at a point again where I'm graduating from the first phase of my career into the second, and its time to re-evaluate my skill set and what offerings I need to be bringing. Technologies are changing, bleeding edge is becoming cutting edge, and it might be the right time to re-align my focus.
Do you guys feel that way sometimes? Do you consciously look out over the landscape and pick out a few technology destinations to work towards every few years when you get that wanderlust feeling?
D